I like Howard Dean. Don't know if I'll vote for him or not, but I admire his willingness to go out there and get angry.
But until a few months ago, I'd never heard of the man. Maybe that's just as well, because according to Declan, Dean gave a speech in early 2002 calling for a national ID card, a proposal that I, like most cyberlibertarians, have a reflexive aversion to. Declan made the partial text of the speech available on his Politech e-mail list, so you can read and judge for yourself. The most troubling part seems to be Dean's proposal that card readers be required in all home PCs.
Of course, this was nearly two years ago. One would like to think that Dean's a bit more attuned to this now.
But reading deeper, it may be that Dean was trying to get at the same kind of layered pseudonymity that Prof. Lessig and others have proposed as a possible solution to the privacy problem (see the last paragraph). From Dean's speech:
The beauty of the Smart Card is that the liquor store doesn’t know anything but age, and the hotel doesn’t know about non-hotel purchases, and the state knows nothing about any of it.
Sounds nice, don't it? The benefits of authentication without the privacy worries. We have the cryptographic tools for such a device. But I strongly doubt that Dean, or any future administration, would really be willing to swear off all that data, which would be so tantalizing for the War On Terror, or the War On Drugs, or the War On Welfare Fraud, or whatever. You can't have half-a-loaf on this -- you either have to have real security, with real legal protections, or you have to admit that your card is really just a Big Brother info-gathering tool.